LG Watch Style Review: Style to watch out for?

With the LG Watch Style, the Korean company is trying to chip away at some other wearable giants. We find out if they could succeed in our full LG Watch Style review!

LG have made enormous strides in the smartphone market, starting with the LG G2 and all the way up to the current flagship, the LG G6. While they have made some headway in the smartwatch market, they are still to find the winning formula.

With the LG Watch Style, they aim to answer the question: what is a smartwatch really for? Is it to be fashion forward or to have all the functionality of a smartphone on your wrist? Is it a combination of the two?

Let’s find out if LG have hit the nail on the head with our full LG Watch Style Review.

Design and Build

As with many of its other wearable products, the LG Watch Style is built in part with Google. However, this one isn’t as big or bulky as its counterpart, the LG Watch Sport. Instead, you are buying the Watch Style to look good, although that might come at the expense of a couple of features.

The LG Watch Style is built really well, and the thinness doesn’t mean there is a compromise in materials. The frame is extremely sturdy and the circular dial feels like a part that comes from a much more expensive piece of hardware. It may bother some people that it does jut out from the chassis of the watch. The interaction with the interface using this dial is extremely smooth, however.

The leather straps also feel more expensive than the price point of this device may suggest. It is genuine leather and easily replaceable with a handy clip to detach and attach a new strap in seconds. Even the straps are thin and sleek to amend to the small, stylish feel this watch is striving for.

Specs and Features

The LG Watch Style has a 1.2 inch P-OLED display, which feels smaller than most other smartwatches due to the slim design, and does not take up your entire wrist. Even people with smaller wrists won’t feel the device on their arm as they might larger ones.

It is IP67 rated for water- and dust resistance, so you won’t need to worry about getting your new watch wet. I wouldn’t go swimming with it, but having some decent water resistance does add comfort when you are out and about.

Unfortunately, the LG Watch Style does not have a heart rate monitor or barometer like the LG Watch Sport, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering who this device is aimed at. It also doesn’t have NFC, so you can’t use Android Pay’s tap to pay functionality. Once again, we don’t feel this is a huge sacrifice considering what you’re paying for the watch.

The LG Watch Style comes with Android Wear 2.0 and the latest version of Google’s wearable software does shine through here. While no one will use the utterly useless keyboard (who can type on one that size?), the interface has been changed significantly since its first iteration.

The vertical scrolling app drawer does make a lot more sense than the previous arrangement, and the new watch faces have programmable indicators for things like location, calendars and time zones. It also comes with Google assistant, but isn’t as polished as on other Android Wear smartwatches. We’re not quite sure why this device has a bit of trouble with voice inputs more than other devices, although we could assume it has something to do with its microphone.

While we found the circular dial very useful when scrolling around, you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. The touchscreen is just as responsive as you would expect from a modern smartwatch.

Conclusion

Overall, the LG Watch Style is one of the first Android Wear I’ve used that doesn’t feel like its big and bulky, taking up your entire wrist. The design is sleek and some would say very fashionable, and it definitely feels more expensive than it is. It retails for around R3,500 which is more than R2,000 cheaper than most other watches on the market today.

It may not be the perfect smartwatch, but it does paint a rosy picture of what Android Wear has on the horizon. Even though there are some feature missing that other watches have as standard, this one if focused more towards the customer that wants their smartwatch to look more like a fashion accessory than a technology machine.